Here in Australia, one of the new senators, Malcolm Roberts, denies anthropogenic global warming. He and/or one of his staff plus a few other deniers have been busy posting odd things refuting AGW on his Facebook page, including various odd explanations and selective bits and pieces, old quotes, etc, to declare that AGW is all a hoax by scientists, scientific organisations and governments around the world. I’ve been picking the deniers to pieces over there but they don’t give up. I posted this comment on his video which he posted to his page a few days ago (although all I get in response is that I’m talking rubbish and more odd comments and selective quotes as the deniers continue to try and support their position) …

This video is misleading and gives totally the wrong impression. Carbon dioxide might be a small percentage of the atmosphere and man-made CO2 a smaller percentage still. But I think he’s mixing up his stocks and flows. He’s right in saying that man-made CO2 is only 3-4% of all CO2 but he seems to be saying that this is the level (stock) of man-made CO2 when in actual fact this is the percentage of man-made CO2 emissions (flow).

The problem is that only about two-fifths of this additional CO2 is absorbed and the rest stays in the atmosphere, building up steadily over time. Roberts seems to forget this. Before the industrial revolution, the CO2 absorption and release sides were pretty much in balance. Since then, we’ve had additional CO2 released by humans in ever-increasing volumes through all our various activities. It may seem small overall but, as I said, it builds steadily over time.

CO2 is now at about 400 parts per million or 0.04% of air as per the video. But over the last 400,000 years and up to the industrial revolution, CO2 varied between about 180 and 280 parts per million, in natural cycles. It was around the top of this cycle at the start of the industrial revolution and is now 40-45% higher at 400 ppm. Normally, it takes 5,000 to 20,000 years to increase by 100 ppm; this time, it has taken perhaps 150 years to increase by 120 ppm. The extra CO2 acts like a blanket, or a thicker blanket, enveloping the earth and keeps the heat in, thus the steadily increasing temperatures. This causes the ice the melt, sea levels to rise and an increase in wilder weather, with increasingly severe storms, larger tidal surges and more coastal flooding, causing damage and displacing people, often in the poorer parts of the world.

He then seems to compare Australia’s CO2 with the world’s total air. His subsequent statistics and analysis are therefore quite flawed.

I’m not sure where his carbon dioxide tax figures come up: $72 billion in five years. This was the estimated cost over this period of an American scheme in the 1990s. Emissions fell when we had carbon pricing in place, they rose before that and have risen again since. Also, getting rid of carbon pricing was estimated by the PBO to cost the budget $18 billion over four years, adding extra pressure to the budget. We now have the useless Direct Action policy.

Roberts says that temperature changes come first and then CO2 levels follow. It actually works both ways. In other words, changes in carbon levels both cause, and result from, changes in temperature. For example, when ocean temperatures rise, more CO2 is released into the atmosphere making the air warmer which means more CO2 is released. We have to also consider the rapid increase in temperatures this time around, much faster than historically. Graphing temperatures and CO2 levels since the 19th century, we can see a very high correlation over this period, which makes sense because the large increase in CO2 acts as a blanket keeping the heat in. To say that nature alone determines CO2 levels not humans, as Roberts states in the video, is simply wrong.

He doesn’t seem to offer any explanation for the increasing temperatures. It can’t be solar activity as that has fallen if anything since the 1970s, nor volcanic eruptions (these are low historically), nor Earth’s orbit (variations and effects on temperature are long term). That leaves greenhouse gases, which includes CO2 which causes up to a quarter of the greenhouse effect. Water vapour has a larger effect but it’s CO2 levels that have easily changed the most. Or does he think scientists use faulty thermometers, or are fudging the numbers?

(I wrote this in 2014 and posted it to Bubblews writing site, now gone.)

These days, would you try to find a literary agent or publisher to publish a book, or just do an ebook?

In the old days, if one wrote a book, the next step was usually to try and get it published commercially (or self-publish and have a garage full of books). This involved many letters or emails to literary agents and/or publishers to try and convince them to take on your precious manuscript. Of course, very few were ever taken on and the proportion is probably even less now. Two reasons for this are the increase in the number of people writing books and the steady move of the industry from print to digital.

Some years ago, I wrote a historical novel, A Weaver’s Web. It is about a poor handloom weaver and his family in early 19th century Lancashire, England. I did the rounds of literary agents and found that no one seemed to be taking on much at all that isn’t written by someone well known for writing or something else, and this seems to be increasingly the case.

One agent even compared my novel to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, “but with the poor family finding its wealth. The location of Manchester during the industrial revolution dictates the action excellently and I can see why readers could not put it down.” I got unsolicited comments back from 18 general readers, five of whom said they couldn’t put it down. I’ve received other good comments from agents (although most just say it doesn’t suit their list or they’re not passionate enough about it), a professional appraiser, and people at writing site Helium. Also, I was top in a university postgraduate creative writing course of 30 students. None of this made any difference.

I’m now taking the ebook option. I think it’s the way to go. I’m not sure if I would any longer recommend a writer first pursues traditional publication, and failing that, do an ebook. Maybe it’s still worth sending a manuscript to a few agents on the off chance. Depending on what sources and figures you look at, it seems the proportion of ebooks vs printed books is now somewhere around 30:70. I read an article saying that by 2017, it’ll be about 50:50.

Cost of an ebook depends on how much you can or want to do yourself: cover, editing, conversion to epub/mobi, and so on, and ranges from nothing to perhaps a couple of thousand for a more complex non-fiction book. An advantage is that you can set your price (generally much lower than printed) but royalties are as high as 70%, compared with around 10% of retail price if your book is in a bookshop. Another advantage is that you can write and publish what you want rather than being tied down by a literary agent who might want a sequel to some book you’ve written and you don’t want to do a sequel or you might want to write a science fiction book or some other genre or topic that the agent doesn’t do.

What do other people think? Has anyone sent a manuscript to agents and publishers? Would you do it again? Or would you think about an ebook instead? Or perhaps you’ve already published one or more ebooks.

In the late 18th century, something happened in Manchester, United Kingdom, that had never occurred anywhere before – the city experienced what would later become known as the Industrial Revolution. It was not a true revolution, characterized by sudden change, but rather an evolution over about seventy years from around 1770 to 1840, which took Manchester and nearby towns from a rural based society to a manufacturing one. In the process, the structure of family life changed completely, from one dominated by agriculture and cottage industries in the country to one of large factories in ever expanding cities and towns. But why did it start in Manchester?

The answer lies in its association with cotton. As early as 1282 a cottage industry existed in Lancashire, making articles of linen cloth and wool. By 1600, production extended to other fabrics such as cotton wool and fustian, or coarse cotton, made of raw materials from the Near East. A hundred years later, cotton became the most important industry in the Manchester area due largely to its moist climate and lime free water, making fiber easier to weave than in other parts of the country. Larger markets and better transport facilities led to strong growth in both the cotton industry and in the Manchester population between 1730 and 1770. The colonies of North America, for example, became not only an important supplier of raw cotton but a market for finished goods.

England had been a major producer of wool, coal and tin, and had well established trade links with Europe since medieval times. But industry was conducted from homes either in the countryside or in villages, and in the case of mining, by small local firms. In the mid 18th century all cotton was still hand spun. A series of inventions during the second half of that century had far reaching ramifications, not only for the cotton business but for society in general.

Rapid expansion of the industry meant the spinners could not produce enough weft on their linen warps to keep the weavers in work. This problem led to the invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 by James Hargreaves, a former weaver of Blackburn. The jenny enabled a person to spin several yarns at once. Successive jennies soon became too large to fit into the village homes of spinners and had to be placed in workshops or factories. Economies of scale were kicking in, where large scale production meant far greater output for a given level of inputs compared with home industry.

Around 1770, Preston barber Richard Arkwright developed the water frame, to be driven by water power in a factory. When Samuel Crompton of Bolton introduced his spinning mule in 1779, a combination of a jenny and a water frame, the burgeoning factory system grew quickly. Factories, large and small, sprang up all over Manchester and surrounding towns. Steam power, first used in 1787, enhanced this growth as it meant factories no longer relied on water power and were not confined to locations beside streams often in the countryside. Growth was also boosted by the expanding overseas markets in Europe and elsewhere. The nearby town of Liverpool became a major port. Further improvements in road and river transport contributed to the rise of large scale industry.

Cotton workers throughout Lancashire and other English counties found they could no longer compete with the new cotton mills. Carding and spinning – traditionally undertaken at home by women and children – were done almost solely in factories by the 1790s. The weavers hung out but their pay diminished dramatically over ensuing decades and they too were forced to abandon their home based handlooms. Thousands of families had no choice but to leave their villages and migrate to the cotton towns and cities to obtain work. The population of Manchester grew from 15,000 in 1750 to 90,000 in 1800, making it the second largest urban area in England behind London.

The downside was that living and working conditions were atrocious, disease was rampant, education and literacy fell away as children worked full-time in factories, and local government services were virtually non-existent. It was not until the second half of the 19th century that these things gradually improved as a result of political pressure by various groups, including the fledgling trade union movement.

A similar industrial transition took place in other parts of Britain from the early 19th century before spreading to Europe, the United States, and later throughout most of the world. But it was in Manchester, United Kingdom, that the conditions were right for it to lead the way in creating an industrialized world that was to dominate society for most of the 19th and 20th centuries before service industries became dominant.